It’s become notable because it is an anti-depressant that takes effect within hours instead of weeks or months required by other popular drugs like Prozac. The findings suggest that development of this drug can help people severely depressed to the point of being on suicide watch.

Apparently, it also helps cure stress. According to one of the Yale professors involved with the study, “ It’s like a magic drug—one dose can work rapidly and last for seven to 10 days.” It’s called Ketamine, and is typically used in anesthetic for children in high doses. It’s also a popular rave drug due to its capability to cause brief psychotic symptoms.

In tests, almost 70 percent of people who responded negatively to ordinary antidepressants improved within hours of taking the ketamine. Because around 40 percent of depressed people don’t respond to medication, this could be a huge help.

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Diabetes is a lifelong disease in which there are high levels of sugar in the blood, and for which there is no cure, only treatment. In the case of Type 2 diabetes, the treatment is almost always a change in diet and exercise habits. However to keep Type 1 diabetes at bay, daily doses of insulin are often required.

In 1922, Sir Fredrick Grant Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin and its significance. Now, it would have been very easy for them to patent the idea and spend their entire lives rolling around in dough. But instead, they decided they wanted to share the life-changing effect of their invention with the entire world.

By not choosing to patent the drug, relatively inexpensive insulin therapy could be immediately available world-wide. For the price of an injection a day, dozens of people with type 1 diabetes have been able to avoid falling into a coma, heart disease, kidney disease, blindness, amputation, and impotence.

This part of history dealt with an question that is perhaps even more relevant today; are the inventors of drugs ethically obliged to make the life-saving products accessible to all those who need them?

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It’s called Modafinil and it’s in a class of drugs called eugeroics. It’s a stimulant in the same vein as caffeine and adenosine, but the difference in how it works the brain means it doesn’t have the same side-effects that the others do.

The way caffeine and Adenosine work is that they block certain receptors in the brain that react to dopamine, which makes it slow down. This means, for example, that coffee does not give you energy, but rather, doesn’t let the brain realize it needs more energy. This is why people crash after caffeine. The effect goes away and all the tiredness catches up to you. Modafinil doesn’t have that problem.

No one really knows how it works yet, but it seems that instead of blocking the brain’s dopamine processing, it just slows production of dopamine. On top of that, it also prevents the re-uptake of another neurotransmitter called noradrenaline, which triggers sleep.

The end result, and one of the most mysterious, is that modafinil doesn’t trigger sleep debt. People who stay awake for a day or two on modafinil don’t report a need to catch up on sleep after the effect wears off. They can sleep the normal amount!

There’s a lot more to say about this, so check out the source if you’re interested.

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Drug trafficking is becoming increasingly high tech. boats have always been used in the drug trade, but in recent years completely submersible boats have come out that cater to the drug lords. It is believed that a whole fleet of submarines are owned by major drug lords in Colombia and Peru.

The submarines can stay completely submerged under water for the entire eight to ten day journey to Mexico or the U.S. from Columbia. They can make their way down rivers to pick up the drugs, too. The submarines are up to 30 meters in length. They can fit four people and eight tons of cocaine. The port city of Buenaventura, Colombia has an abundance of out-of-work sea captains who will make the journey for the right price.

These submarines are a major game changer that poses a new challenge to the DEA. It is harder to catch these submarines that run on a simple propeller and made for the drug runners.

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If you’ve seen Iron Man enough, you might have caught the Burger King product placement.

While product placement isn’t exactly a rarity anymore (in fact, it’s only going to increase in movies in the coming years), the deal to have Burger King in Iron Man was actually spawned because of how it saved Robert Downey Jr.’s life.

According to RDJ, in 2003 he was driving a car full of drugs when he decided to go grab a burger.

The burger he had was, apparently, exceptionally disgusting. So repulsive was the burger that he thought something really bad was going to happen.

It made him rethink where his life was going, and so he drove down to the ocean and threw all the drugs that were in his car into it.

From that point forward, he started recovering from his drug use. Of course for Burger King it’s a bit of a double edged sword, because though it’s advertisement by a celebrity, a “horrible burger” doesn’t really resonate that well with people.

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To say that rapper 50 Cent had a difficult childhood would be an understatement. Born as Curtis Jackson III, he grew up in an impoverished urban neighborhood in Queens, New York.

He was raised without a father and his mother died when he was 8, after which he went to live with his grandparents and 8 aunts and uncles. At the age of 12, he began dealing narcotics as a way to raise money.

However it never crossed his mind, even to this day, to take those drugs. He saw what they did to his mother’s siblings and would rather save than money than blow it on drugs. At a correctional boot camp, he adopted the name 50 cent as a metaphor for “change.” He is now a successful rapper, entrepreneur, investor, record producer, and actor.

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Bayer AG is a German company best known for their development of aspirin, yet for as famous as they are, few people know the dark history Bayer has. First founded in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer after discovering aspirin, Bayer AG would go on to become one of the largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies in the world.

The company grew until they were purchased by IG Farben, another German chemical company. IG Farben used intense slave labor in their factories, most notably at Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, and during the Nazi regime had few human rights restrictions to follow. In fact, IG Farben produced 42.5% of the chemical used in the gas chambers of various concentration camps in Germany.

When they purchased Bayer they continued to use human test subjects, and many of the chemicals that were being tested, both to help and hurt humans, were tested on human subjects. Bayer became known for this practice and by the end of the war the Bayer executive, Fritz ter Meer, was arrested and imprisoned for crimes against humanity.